Shadows Upon Time (The Sun Eater, #7)

by Christopher Ruocchio

Grief is deep water, dear boy.

“Fight well, seek beauty, speak truth.

“For our people, then,” it said, brittle, angry, wound up as a spring. I straightened, looked all round, seeking the place where the silverfish projectors had sketched his spectral image. But the good commander—the Commandant General Lorian Aristedes—did not appear. There were tears unfallen in my eyes then, and I shut them to stop them falling. “The Mistwalker has opened fire on the Imperial swarm.” The pilot’s voice was like thunder.

“This is the last time, Hadrian,” came the good commander’s brittle words. “The last time.” “I understand,” I said. “I am sorry, Lorian.” “Save it!” he said. “There is a battle to win.”

May Time, Ever-Fleeting, forgive me.

“No, Hadrian. This is the end. I have given you all I have to give.” He looked at me at last. His eyes were like broken glass. “You consume everything you touch. You know that? This vision of yours—this dream.”

I saw Lorian then, as I had never seen him. Saw him, perhaps, with the eyes the Absolute had given me. He was always in my shadow—had been my shadow—nearly all his life. He had lost all that I had lost at Akterumu. Lost 2Maeve as I had lost Valka. As I had not been there for Valka at the end, so he, too, had not been there for his lady. Of all the men in creation, he and I were most alike. He was my shadow. My echo . . . My heir. He was one the god himself had held in reserve—I saw it plain. He had been positioned to take my place if I should fail.

“You should have told me,” he said. “I loved you, Hadrian. There was a time I would have died for you—I tried to, in truth.” Three times he stabbed the deck between his feet. “But I can never trust you again.”

“We are Orphan,” it said, “last in the line of Columbia.” “Last of the machines.” “—but no machine.” “Last of the Americans.”

“They underestimated my people,” I said. The chimera was silent a good moment. “Did they indeed . . .” he said at last, voice strangely hushed.

“Does it matter?” asked she—ever the pragmatist. “Does it change what we have to do?” “No,” I allowed. “It doesn’t matter. It wouldn’t matter . . . even if we were just . . . characters in a book. Our lives are still our own, our stories . . .” I touched her shoulder once again. “We’re all just stories in the end.”

and I was sent away, retired to the old manse beneath the Fire School—that I might live to death.

But I wanted them to see me. I wanted them to remember. “You wanted Marlowe,” I said simply. “Here I am.”

“If I had doubts about your identity, Lord Marlowe, this would end them,” Aurelian said.

“You are to address the Emperor as Your Radiance,” said the little androgyn. “Honorable Caesar is also permitted. You are to approach on your knees, stopping every third step to abase yourself fully . . .” The doors—twin pieces of gilded steel each weighing hundreds of pounds—swung inward. The light of the hall and the weeks-long day cast my shadow forward into the darkened chamber. I did not kneel.

“I did what I had to do,” I said. “Did you know? About the Chantry?” The Emperor did not reply at once. There were dark shadows beneath his eyes, and the eyes themselves had lost their shine. “I . . . suspected,” he said. “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes, my old friend . . .” Who guards the guardsmen? Who watches the watchers?

“I am sorry . . .” The words shocked me so badly I flinched, looked up at the face of the colossus. This was the Emperor. Emperors did not apologize.

“I understood my error the moment you struck me, but then it was too late,” he said. “I could not let what you did go unpunished, but you were right to do as you did. I meant to honor you, to offer my daughter’s hand as consolation for what you had lost. She is a good girl, my Selene . . . but I have never lost what you have lost. I have never had it.”

“William . . .” “A hundred years of nothing,” he said, the last word bitter as gentian. His massive face was nodding. “Can I count on you to be my sword one last time?”

“Together,” William agreed. “Very good . . . very, very good . . .” “Where are you, William?” I asked. How little I understood how much hung upon that answer. How much horror, how many billion lives. And my life. My soul. “Gododdin,” he said. “I am at Gododdin.”

The preciousness of any beautiful thing—any good thing—lies in its scarcity. And because all things are scarce when measured against eternity and infinity, all things are beautiful—if seen at the right angle, if captured in the right light.

Prince Alexander swept his eyes over his strategoi. “Hadrian Marlowe is many things, Leonid. Mad, yes. Arrogant, certainly. But faithless?” He shook his head. “Father—my Imperial Master, I should say—always said you were a sword without a handle. I say you’re nothing but the edge.” “I have been called much worse,” I said, not faltering under the prince’s empyrean stare. “Command suits you, Alexander.”

The Tavrosi grand admiral scoffed. “You think that Dorayaica would mobilize its entire war machine for you?” Yes. “No,” I said.

Always forward. Always down. Time runs down.

“Rarely do we choose our road,” I said, and smiled. “But we can choose how we walk it. Every day.”

Valka, I prayed, Valka, I failed you

“Anaryan.”

Still, I longed for her touch, her heart, a quiet word. I got a smile, those darkly painted lips parting, curling. “One last fight,” she said, and raised her eyes to mine. They were Cassandra’s eyes.

I’ll not say a word to her—she’s a hideous piece of work, the young miss is—but I love you both. And love is a choice.” “I have not found it so,” I said. “That is only because you make up your mind faster than you can think, begging your pardon, sir.”

“When, then, will I be freed?” “When I am certain I’ve no further use for you.” To my astonishment, Here Soonchanged laughed, a rough, barking sound . . . like coughing, like gunfire. “Then I will be here until the stars burn out.” “Is that so?” I said, smile just barely reaching my eyes, after all. “I know my uses,” said Here Soonchanged.

“There were so many of them. Thousands. Millions. They stretched to the horizon, Abba. She was just on the edge . . .” She looked at me, the tracks of her fallen tears turned aside by the light of her smile. “She was waiting for me. She turned me back, pointed. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done . . .‘Cassandra!’ She said my name, and I knew I shouldn’t look back—but I did . . .”

limitless ocean, our feet in shifting sand. “‘Tell your father he was right,’ she said. ‘Quite right.’” I pulled my hand from hers, turned to hide my face. “Abba? Right about what?” It really had been her.

“What? Die?” She laughed weakly. “I’m your daughter. I can’t promise you that.”

Reader, I have often thought—have little said in this account—that I am insane.

“We name our children when they’re born,” I said. Ramanthanu’s eyes narrowed—another curiously human gesture. “How? You do not know them.” I looked at Cassandra. “You know who you hope they’ll be.” “Hope?” Ramanthanu echoed the human word. “What is this?” There was no Cielcin word for hope. “You should name it.”

“My daughter . . .” The words came slowly. “It does me good to see you well. When you vanished . . . I feared you would not return.” Does me good. I feared. Not us. Not we.

posture. A performance. “I . . . am Mankind,” William said. “I am Empire. Emperor. I rule. Should rule. Not the Chantry. Not the Council. Not my ministers. Me. That is what the people believe. My people . . . an-an-and they are my peo-people.” The Emperor was silent a moment as Gall and Vrabel adjusted their levels. “Earlier you spoke of children. There is not a soul in my Imperium who is not one of mine. I have tried to be a father to them—to you all. An Emperor should be a father to his people. His people deserve a father. The Chantry would sooner cuckold me, as they had my mother, and her father before her. They would sooner a catamite sit the throne than a man—man they they they cannot control. I—”

“Peace, Nicky,” William said, then, “It is in no small part thanks to you, Hadrian, that I have held them back these many centuries. The clergy. The lords. Even my dear wife. Your . . . performance has serv—served to kee—keep keep them at bay. You have been a useful ally. My instrument, and my . . . friend.” My friend . . . The words were like a knell. “Is that what I am?” I asked.

But it was an outstanding one. “You swore an oath to me, once,” the Emperor said, voice still machine-dead. I spoke swiftly, almost spoke over him. “That was a long time ago.” “I am not asking you to serve me,” came the answer, so rapidly I hardly thought it a reply. “I am asking you to serve for me.”

old Emperor. “This machine prolongs my life. So long as I live, I am Emperor, but I cannot act as Emperor, not as I should. I—we—have it in mind to na-na-name you you auc—”

contagious, which complicates treatment.” Vrabel touched his hat nervously. “He speaks of you often, you know?” I looked at the physician. He did look palatine to me, short as he was and round shouldered. “Whence come you, Doctor?” The man stammered. “You’d not have heard of it, lordship.” “He’s an adorator,” Selene said, having returned from the mirror, her face and dignity restored. Vrabel bowed. “It is not rude to say that I am a Jew, Highness,” he said, but returned his attention to me. “There is hardly a conversation that goes by in which His Radiance does not mention you.”

I, William the Twenty-Third of the Av-Av-Aventine House; Emperor of Man Man Mankind; Firstborn Son of Earth; Guardian of the So-So-So—Sovereign of the Kingdom of Windsor-in-Exile; Prince Imperator of the Arms of Orion, of Sagittar-tar-tarius, of Perseus, and Centaurus—rand Strategos of the Legions of of of the Sun; Supreme Lord of the Cities of Forum; North Star Star Star Star Star—Palatine; Defender of the Children of of of of of the Servants of Earth, upon my name name name and throne do decree that Hadrian, Son of Alistair of the House Marlowe, be elevated to the office of Auctor of the Imp-Imp-Imp-Imperium. To serve as my hand, to speak with my voice my voice my voice, to exercise all my power and authority.”

“The Eternal City is fallen,” it said.

The music faded, and His Radiance acknowledged the salutes and adulation of his men with a languid nod. He drew level with Cassandra and myself. How many times had I seen him thus? Riding upon the gestatory throne? Carried by soldiers or by his androgyns? How fitting it was that at the last—on the last day that world would ever see, in the evening of his Empire—he should stand on his own two feet.

That terror lessened then, at the sound of her father’s voice. You need not rule alone . . . The poor girl looked at me—tears unfallen in those eyes wide as pools—and she smiled. By all the stars in heaven, she smiled at me, and I felt my heart break to see how the Emperor’s pronouncement comforted her. The relief she felt was like a wave, like the tide overtaking me, and I might have buckled. She’s only Tavrosi. The words were like a knell. Only Tavrosi. Only Tavrosi.

He was dying, had been dying for decades, and for perhaps longer. Dying of a disease he had contracted ministering to his sick children. I went to one knee before him—not as a soldier, but as a son. “You are, I think, the best man I have ever known,” I told him.

“It’s . . .” I could hardly say the name. “It’s Mistwalker,” I said at last. “It’s Commandant General Aristedes.”

And there he was, last of all and greatest—though the least in stature.

“Radiant Majesty,” he said, “I am Lorian Aristedes, Supreme Commandant of Latarra, Grand Admiral of Roundtable Fleet, First-Among-Equals of the Free Captains of the same, Captain of the Starship Mistwalker, a veteran of Almatana, Ceuta, and Eragassa, where I bested the Cielcin General Teyanu, one of the Prophet’s own.” He did not bow. This pronouncement sent a shockwave through the court, set the lords to muttering.

The little man smiled. “Some legends never die.” “Gone mercenary, have you?” “I fight for the right,” said Lorian. “Same as you.” “Thank you,” I said, “for coming.” The good commander nodded stiffly. “I have business with Dorayaica.” “Vengeance,” I said. “Justice.” Lorian raised his chin, his voice. “Fire for the Cielcin! That is what we have brought!”